Letter: Grey area or no difference?
There is a grey area between what Lenin called “bourgeois workers’ parties” or “liberal labour parties” and straightforward bourgeois parties with worker support but no organised working-class base. On that Eric Lee ( Solidarity 643 ) is right, I think. The issue was raised as long ago as the 1960s by the withered and right-wing character then of the French Socialist Party and German Social Democratic Party. Yet “a grey area” doesn’t mean “no difference”. The Democratic Party in the USA certainly draws on union officials; but the unions have no structural role in it comparable to the unions’...